Tag Archives: Slovenia

Is the journey to good governance paved with good intentions? Yearly snapshots of governance indicators are effective benchmarks. Causality? That seems to be more difficult to determine. How does a government effectively sequence reform to achieve improved governance indicators? How can we predict that a government will achieve improvements in the future? I think that Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) assessments are the best vehicle at hand. PEFA assessments characterize the Public Financial Management (PFM) environment in government. We’ve pointed out how the Government of Kosovo has improved results from the 2007 to the 2009 PEFA assessment. And these results are superior, on average, to other PEFA assessments.

How does this compare to with other countries in South Eastern Europe? Published PEFA assessments include:

Only Kosovo has published two PEFA reports. Kosovo is the only South Eastern European country to have published a recent PEFA report. So, there is a rather small sample size for comparison. Kosovo has shown good results, particularly in budget execution and budget transparency.

population size… results seem to indicate that larger country size is generally associated with better PFM system performance

higher level of income perform better in terms of the quality of their PFM systems

Yet, Kosovo has a lower population than all South Eastern European countries except Montenegro and has the lowest GDP per capita

The Kosovo PEFA results are remarkable. It takes time for country governance mechanism improvements to show in governance indicators. For example, World Bank indicators for Control of Corruption and Government Effectiveness are lower than the peer group.

My sense is that many of the elements in the PEFA assessment represent dependencies that result in improved governance outcomes. There is some anecdotal evidence to support this view: